The Hebrides Ensemble turns 25 this year with a fine heritage of commissioning new works, supporting Scottish composers and performing solid interpretations of 20th-century chamber music. But does today’s Hebrides still sound as “diverse, imaginative and inspiring”, which its mission statement claims, as it once did?
The group has some great regular members – clarinettist Yann Ghiro is a mighty player who keeps things buoyant whenever he’s involved – but in recent years the general dynamic has felt a little tired and rigid. These two anniversary projects confirmed as much.
In Glasgow, I saw the premiere of The Iris Murder: a new chamber opera for three voices and an eerie, soft-grained ensemble of clarinet, cello, accordion and percussion, with music by Alasdair Nicolson and words by John Gallas. It’s a masque, a Buddhist revenge tale, an earnest postmodern morality fable. As a drama, it doesn’t really hang together – not in this drab production, anyway – but what does work is Nicolson’s instrumental score: he has a knack for elegiac, evocative writing with a flint edge and subtle lyricism.
Nicolson is the director of Orkney’s St Magnus international festival, itself proudly turning 40 this year, and in Kirkwall the Hebrides reworked an early festival concert given by Peter Maxwell Davies’s ensemble The Fires of London. Then the programming must have sounded radical; now the interpretations of works by Debussy, Messiaena and Thomas Adès seemed po-faced. A new piece called Midsummer Sunrise by John Gourlay was full of spry and urgent sounds, but it deserved a performance to match.
